Download Chapters 13 and 14 Chapter 13 The Old South

The Old South and the Coming of
the Civil War
• Stereotypes about the South include magnolias and moonlight,
slaves ,Simon Legree, and poor whites.
The climate and topography of the South was
not truly unique. Corn, not cotton, was the most
plentiful crop. Other crops besides cotton
including hemp, sugar, rice, tobacco, were
grown.
The slave labor system did not exclude industry and
business from the old South nor did Southern values. Most
southern planters were practical men who studied
agriculture as a business and organized their labor force
efficiently.
• Cotton did produce the cash income, but Southern agriculture
was diverse.
• The overall economic performance of the antebellum south
was ahead of all but a few European countries in cloth output
and railroad mileage.
• The gap between the Old South and the North industrialization
arose from the fact that planters put their capital into
agriculture rather than manufacturing.
Social Diversity
• The layers of southern society were more complex than
planters, poor whites, and black slaves.
• The typical slave holder was middle class.
• In 1860, 71 percent of slaveholders had fewer than 10 slaves.
• While yeomen farmers were more numerous and worked their
farms themselves or with the help of family and occasional
hired labor.
• Wealth was more concentrated in the North than in the South.
• There was a class of very poor, rural, southern whites.
The planter autocracy often occupied more influential positions
beyond their formal power and far beyond that of yeoman
farmers.
The South’s white, non-slaveholding yeoman often resented
slavery and planter leadership
Life Under Slavery
• Clichés of slavery include that slavery was a
benign institution. Happy blacks singing in the
fields, not feeling or acting oppressed. Or
slavery as a system of organized terror that
either broke the spirit of black people or drove
them to rebel against their masters.
• Slave life was diverse and difficult.
• Most southern blacks were slaves, but at the
beginning of the Civil War about 250,000 were
free blacks.
Most southern blacks were slaves, but at the beginning of
the Civil War about 250,000 were free blacks.
Most free blacks lived in the slums of large southern
towns, worked at menial jobs, and were denied
fundamental civil rights.
• In 1860, there were about four million slaves in the south and
most of them worked the soil on large plantations.
• There was some advantage to working on a large plantation for
slaves. There were many different jobs and skilled artisan
slaves could control their working conditions to a great degree.
• Slaves living on large plantations were more physically
comfortable than slaves living on smaller ones. Large
plantations could provide medical services, weather tight
cabins, and a varied diet.
• Even though blacks were enslaved, they developed a
distinctive black American culture.
• They achieved a remarkable musical and oral literature
tradition.
• Religion played a central role in black life and helped to
preserve a sense of black freedom.
• Blacks found a sense of hope and freedom in their religion and
in their spirituals.
Slave families were often broken up by the selling of a
family member.
The law in the Old South did not recognize the sanctity of
slave marriages.
Some masters did encourage slave marriages and despite
the obstacles, there were a large number of stable slave
families
• The 1860 census revealed that 10 percent of the slave
population had partly white ancestry.
• Miscegenation-mating across racial lines- didn’t often take
place on well run plantations, but was less unusual in cities
and towns.
The bottom line of slavery was that slaves did not
control their own lives.
Slaves had no legal rights and were not allowed to
develop their human potential.
Slavery reinforced racism.
• Another myth about the Old South was that it was a genteel,
cultivated society. This was partially true, but after 1860, the
South was also a land of fear and suspicion.
• The South feared Slave Revolts with reason.1822, Denmark
Vesey. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831.
In 1832 the Virginia legislature debated the possible
abolition of slavery in Virginia, the last serious
public discussion of slavery in the South.
Southerners also hated Abolitionism
• Arguments in favor of slavery
• Slavery was sanctioned by the Bible and the Christian faith.
Virginian George Fitzhugh used a sociological
argument, contending that slavery was a positive
good, not a necessary evil.
Cult of chivalry.
• Southern Political Ideology
• Southern thinkers questioned majoritarian
democracy.
• Southerners worried about their slow growth
as compared to the North. Some blamed it on
the commercial dominance of the North.
• John C. Cahoun critiqued democracy but he
did not want the union destroyed. He hoped to
preserve it by helping the South accommodate.
• Conclusions
• The old South was diverse society with
regional, class and economic divisions.
• Despite its economic success, the Old South
was not a serene and confident society.
• The Old South lived on the forced labor of
millions of black slaves.
• Slave era southerners shared memories,
political values and cultural attributes with
other Americans, but diverged more and more
from the liberal mainstream of the country.
The Coming of the Civil War
• In the 1830s and 1840s, the North began to
industrialize and evolve into an open,
culturally diverse society.
• The South held firm to its stake in plantation
agriculture and embraced social conformity
and defensiveness.
• Ideological Differences between the North and
South.
• Southern political and intellectual leaders
endorsed a society based on slavery,
condemned dissent, rejected commercial
values, endorsed inequality and resisted social
change.
• The North embraced a value system of
freedom, intellectual, social and political
freedom, free values and attitudes.
• The economic systems of the North and South
were in conflict. The tariff was a a divisive
factor.
• The two most important economic issues
diving the North and South were there issue of
a Pacific railroad and a homestead act.
• After the Mexican War, the bonds between
slave holding states grew stronger while the
ones attaching them to the Union grew weaker.
• The Wilmot Proviso
• David Wilmot was a northern Democrat from
Pennsylvania. In August 1846, Wilmot
introduced a resolution that said none of the
territory gained from the Mexican War would
allow slavery.
• The Compromise of 1850
• Stephen Douglas, Henry Clay and Daniel
Webster worked together on a compromise
between the North and South.
• The Compromise of 1850 provided that
California would enter the Union as a free
state. New Mexico would be organized as two
territories, New Mexico and Utah, and would
decide for themselves whether they would be
slave or free states. There would be a new,
stricter, fugitive slave law.
• For a time, people celebrated the preserving of
the Union.
• In the fall of 1859, John Brown, his sons, and a
small band of black and white supporters
assaulted the federal armory at Harper Ferry
Virginia.
• The raid brought sectional antagonisms to a
boil. The raid convinced Southerners that the
North would stop at nothing to undermine
slavery.
• Brown was tried for treason, convicted and
sentenced to hang, but many in the North
considered him a hero.
• The Kansas-Nebraska Act
• In 1854 Stephen Douglas introduced the
Kansas-Nebraska Act which repealed the part
of the 1820 Missouri Compromise that forbade
slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of
36’30’. It divided the territory into two parts,
Kansas to the south and Nebraska to the North.
He had reopened a door that Congress had
once closed to slavery.
• Conclusions
• At the beginning, only a small majority of
Northerners saw the war as a crusade against
the social evil of slavery.
• Southerners had a deep stake in slavery and
feared social and economic collapse if it
collapsed.
• When the Republican Party which opposed
slavery won the 1860 election with Abraham
Lincoln, the South feared it would abolish
slavery.
• Slavery defined the South and set it off against
the North.
• Slavery made the clash of economic interests
more bitter. Slavery also converted the
Mexican Cession into a source of constantly
escalating friction that couldn’t be contained
by the existing party system or other
institutions that transcended section.
• The antebellum generation of Americans were
not willing to compromise. Douglas could
have filled the past role of Webster and Clay,
but he badly miscalculated in 1854 with the
Kansas Nebraska Bill and helped sever the
Union.